There comes a time in every long cycle ride when you just can't pedal any more. For me, inauspiciously, this moment came just under halfway through and I therefore took a detour to a luxury spa for a welcome day out of the saddle.

Thorpe Park, a brand new hotel just outside Leeds, was a real site for sore thighs. I spent an enjoyable hour or two sprawled on my pristine white bed linen and downy pillows, fine-tuning the digitally controlled air conditioning and sampling the four varieties of complimentary tea while my filthy clothes slunk into the laundry bag.

I bypassed the gym - somehow I didn't feel like using the cycling machines - and spent a blissful morning flitting from pool to steamroom to jacuzzi and back again. The afternoon was even better: a holistic aromatherapy total body care massage, or, to put it another way, 90 minutes of pure pleasure for aching limbs. As a fellow swimmer observed laconically: It beats working for a living.

Unfortunately none of this was getting me any closer to John O'Groats, so I dusted down the bike and headed off north from Blackburn.

In Whalley, Lancs, I paused to watch the England-Denmark game in a heaving pub where I was the only sober spectator. At halftime in rushed a wedding party who hadn't managed to shift their ceremony to avoid the big match.

Then I entered the Forest of Bowland and the moors and fells of north Lancashire. Sheep and cows roam the land, their movement checked only by cattle grids. At one point my path was blocked by a phalanx of sheep lined up across the road.

The straight deserted lanes and challenging climbs make this perfect cycling country and I met a dozen enviably pannier-free day-tripping bicyclists in a single afternoon. One elderly gent on a racer shot past me as I laboured up a long hill, shouting over his shoulder that he was just out stretching his legs.

As the mileometer clicked on to 500 miles I had the third puncture of my trip, but I was so blissed out by the views and the sunshine that I was almost smiling as I repaired it. Almost.

As soon as I entered North Yorkshire, and I'm not making this up, a smiling apple-cheeked farmer touched his cap to me and said "Eh-up". I spent an enjoyable evening in a pub in High Bentham with a wisecracking quiz team whose wit would have made the Kalahari look soggy.

My route through Cumbria skirted between the Lake District to the west and the Pennines to the east. For miles I cycled through stunning moor and pastureland, across stony streams and past immaculate drystone walls. I'm getting better at hills, but I was grateful to be admiring the high peaks of the Pennines to my right rather than riding up them.

I've been staying in bed and breakfasts booked a couple of days in advance, and by and large they've been pretty good. For around £20-25 you get a clean bed, a decent shower and a kettle and teabags. If you're lucky there's a hairdryer, and a double bed rather than two singles. Some of my hosts have shown genuine kindness, washing clothes, toasting teacakes on arrival and providing lifts to restaurants. Several have sponsored me.

In among these pearls have been two swine, including a nameless abomination in Cumbria last night. As well as a visible layer of dust and a cup of coffee granules so old they'd gone solid, there was ample evidence in the bathroom of the previous guest's toilet habits. Extricating myself rapidly, I relocated to a power-shower-and-teacake paradise with background Mozart over breakfast. Bliss. Next stop Scotland.